Electronic Voting, Spring 2020

Apr 22 notes and discussion

Part of the CS:4980:0004 Electronic Voting Notes
by Douglas W. Jones
THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA Department of Computer Science

NY Times Editorial on the Rescheduled Election

This is not the reading I intended, but my source materials are locked in my office so this merely pins down a central fact. 9/11/2001 was an election day in New York City, and the election was cancelled and rescheduled to take place just 2 weeks later.

There are two completely independent story lines here. One is the legal story, how did the city manage to find an interpretation of the law permitting the election to be cancelled and redone. Many codes of election law have no provisions at all for emergency situations that might require such an action.

The second story line is the one that concerns us most. How can an election department pull off such a stunt. As it turns out, the New York City Bureau of Elections was located only a few blocks from the World Trade Center, deep inside what was known as the red zone. Nobody was allowed back into that neighborhood for a long time after the trade center collapsed.

FEMA To Reimburse

There are only the faintest hints in this press release about what the city had to do in order to hold its make-up election.

The Story

The story I wanted you to read was the one told by a representative of the Bureau of Elections at the meeting of the Council on Government Ethics Laws on Sept. 30, 2002 in Ottowa, Canada. What follows is my memory of that talk.

On Feb. 26, 1993, Ramzi Yousef parked a truckload of explosives in the underground parking garage of the World Trade Center in New York, working at the direction of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman. This bomb killed 6 people and created a cavity spanning 5 sublevels of the building.

The elections office was just a few blocks away, and this bombing was their wake-up call alerting them to the fact that they were exposed to risks that they had not anticipated, so the elections office undertook a serious disaster preparedness exercise. In the end, they incorporated a number of things into their routine operations:

This worked on Sept 11, 2001. In the chaos of the collapse of the World Trade Center towers, it took hours for people to get home, but by the end of the next morning, all of the staff were accounted for, the most recent backups located, and, working from home and by phone, the bureau of elections began to study what to do.

Within a few days, they managed to locate temporary quarters, in what had been a student commons area at Columbia University, and in parallel to finding quarters, they rented computer equipment, configured the necessary software and restored their files from backup. The legal staff must have been working on whether and when to hold the make-up election in parallel with this effort.

Once the date and time of the make-up election were determined, polling place locations had to be arranged. Most locations outside the red zone were not changed, but in lower Manhattan, significant changes were made because of the evacuations in the red zone. Pollworkers also had to be recruited on short notice, although again, many of the pollworkers who had been scheduled to work on 9/11 were available for the make-up.

Working through the weekend and using commercial bulk-mail facilities, they mailed every voter in New York City instructions for voting in the make-up election.

The World Trade Center was itself a polling place, and the equipment there was lost in the building collapse. This was all mechanical-lever voting machines, since New York had yet to replace that equipment. This means that there was no software or reprogramming required to actually run the election. Nonetheless, this story is an example of a real success in disaster planning and demonstrates a model of how to get things right.

There are at least three clear lessons from this story: